Like a Thief in the Night

A crazed group is seeking cheap publicity by claiming that the world will end tomorrow. (No, I will not link to them or mention their name.) The end will come around 6:00 PM according to these loons which I assume is Pacific Standard Time since these mopes are based, where else?, in California. Since the time of Christ there have been constant confident predictions naming the date of the end of the world and the Second Coming, all in direct contradiction to Christ’s own words that He will come “like a thief in the night” and that no man will know the hour of His coming.

In the very unlikely event that tomorrow will see the end of the world, I do hope the New York Times does have the opportunity to get out one last edition with this oft-predicted headline: WORLD ENDS: WOMEN AND MINORITIES HARDEST HIT.

Update: Saturday, May 21, 2011: 8:45 PM Central Standard Time:

“With no sign of Judgment Day arriving as he had forecast, the 89-year-old California evangelical broadcaster and former civil engineer behind the pronouncement seemed to have gone silent on Saturday.”

I’m almost ready. I just can’t decide whether to dress formal or corporate casual. I expect TAC readership will drop dramatically Sunday, but that’s okay, most of the TAC contributers will surely be gone too. For my lawyer friends here, I will miss you, but they say a thousand years really flies by in Heaven.

Since it is a Saturday, if it is hot I will be wearing shorts and a t shirt. If it is not, I will be wearing, as usual when I am not in my “working clothes”, a flannel shirt and jeans.

If the world does end on Saturday I will attempt to do one last post with an appropriate Youtube video, although it would be slightly more serious in tone than this one so an Onion video probably would be out.

If I make it to purgatory I should have ample time to post RL, so you can still read my missives while I am being chastised for my manifold sins. The Purgatory Catholic-I like the sound of that!

“Does she get raptured up with the baby? Does she get cast down once the baby is delivered?”

A defense in English Common Law was pleading the belly when a woman who was pregnant was on trial for a capital offense. I would be looking up the law on that subject in the next 24 hours! If you happen to be standing behind Leo McKern in the goats and sheep line, perhaps he could put the plea to the Almighty! 🙂

When this prophecy fails, the majority of the suckers involved won’t leave the group. Research into groups like this show that the more time, effort, and money the members put into organizations like this, the more likely the poor dupes are willing to stay.

The shame is that Harold Camping was reasonable and humble at one point in his career. When I heard him describing his theory on the radio in his Biblical History of Time series some years ago, he acknowledged that we could not determine the “day or the hour” of the end of time, but said that we are permitted to determine the “year and the month” of the end, which I thought was legalistic and implausible, but sufficiently humble to keep me tuned in.

His long and painstaking disseration (hundreds of hours) recounting the exact passage of time in the Old Testament was worth listening to (for me anyway) because it attempted to be rule-based. For instance, when measuring time based on the lives of the patriarchs, Camping specifically focused on wherever the words “she bore a son, and called his name…” appeared as the tipoff that the biblical calendar continues through that particular patriarch.

Another basic rule he claims to have followed is “a day is like a thousand years” in determining the end date. Rules like that led to anticipation that we were building to a meaningful result rather than something completely random. What I got out of it was exegesis of otherwise biblical passages I would normally tend to think were not terribly interesting or important.

He was also humble enough to acknowledge that his calculation was so complex, he might be wrong in couple of places and off “by a few years”. (All these quotes are entirely from memory, so I apologize in advance if any are wrong, but I think I’ve captured them accurately.) No matter, since the basic message seemed to be live as a Christian and prepare for the end.

All of that humility and careful introspection is gone now and his fans, who are otherwise devote Christians, seem to be setting themselves up for a big fall. Atheists and secularists in particular will ridicule them (and by extention other Christians) to no end.

Should I get raptured, I would like to remain a contributor to TAC. Heaven probably has awesome Internet connections (those prayers have to get answered somehow). Just think of the content I would provide, and maybe even get answers to some of our nation’s greatest mysteries: Who shot Kennedy? What’s in Area 51? Who’s buried in the tomb of the Unknown Soldier? What did Mrs Lincoln really think of the play?

In fact, submit questions you’d like to be answered, and I’ll do my best.

I guess about now the US is disintegrating – California and Arcadia splitting off the US mainland with Mt.St Helens, Mt. Hood and all those other volcanoes really going off, a massive earthquake totally inverting the fault near Kansas (can’t remember its name off hand) etc. etc.

I was expecting a flood of concerned Americans landing in Auckland about now, because Sat. 6 pm. occurred 17 hours ago – a beatiful late Autumn Sunday here and all’s right with the world. 🙂

And now for lunch, then a visit to my daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren.

No Don, just a rather dull—wait, is that the sound of a trumpet that I hear? Could it be? It is! The neighbor’s kid has decided once again to practice playing her trumpet next to an open window! Close your window!